The original natural family living magazine, founded in 1976. Reader-supported
and trusted by thinking people around the world who want positive alternatives
to high cost, high consumption lifestyles for themselves and their families.
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
from Natural Life Magazine, March/April
2010 The Smell of Ice
I have this dream of my family on the rocky shoreline of Ellesmere Island. My husband stands on one side of Kieran and I stand on the other. With the tiny community of Grise Fiord behind us, we look out over the bay and tell him our story, the story of how we met. The High Arctic is the place where both my husband and I held our first teaching jobs. It is the place where we met and fell in love. It is also an ecosystem profoundly in danger thanks to consumer excess and industrial pollution. In this Inuit hamlet of one hundred and fifty people, my students cheered for me when I jumped a crack in the sea ice on my Ski-Doo. As a new teacher, I didn’t think it unusual when I supervised school field trips where I was the only unarmed person. Students who were oppositional in the classroom offered me tea and bannock on the land, asking if I felt warm enough. They are at home out on the sea ice, an environment many would find intolerable. Will Kieran, like me, gaze up at the eternal sky, as he lays on a sled pulled by a dog team? Will he taste the fresh warmth of seal meat? Will he drink the pure water from a glacial lake? Will he . . . To read the rest of this article and thousands of others in Natural Life, subscribe to Natural Life Magazine's digital edition. Andrea Cameron is a mother and educator living in Eastern Ontario. She writes a weekly column for The Brockville Voice. Her poetry and fiction has appeared in Room Magazine and The Antigonish Review. You can read her blog at andreacameron.blogspot.com. She has also written articles for previous issues of Natural Life Magazine. |
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
My son may never see a polar bear in the wild. Among the great
tragedies of the world, this is perhaps a minor issue, but it means two things.
First, we’ll experience significant change in our planet’s ecosystems within
this lifetime – it’s already happening. Second, we haven’t protected the earth
for the next generation. In fact, we’ve done a fine job of screwing it up.
